The Moon's Cloud
by the stargate time traveller
Summary: A missing scene set in 'April Moon' where Batman searches the gang's hideout.


Disclaimer - I own nothing of the Batman franchise, so I don't get anything.

Feedback - feel free.

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The Moon's Cloud.

Three out of four members of the gang he was now starting to think of as the 'April Moon' gang were unconscious, moaning in pain while the remains of their cybernetic components were scattered around the rooftop, but Batman felt little sympathy for them though he knew from his medical and science textbooks which were more advanced than anything Bruce or Barbara had read in their day the loss of the cybernetic components had been extremely painful.

That was the problem with cybernetics, really; they were integrated into the body so well they became a part of the body.

Batman studied the moaning bodies around him before he looked around, and with an inward groan of irritation, he saw the one dubbed Bullwhip was nowhere near where he'd been left after he'd been electrocuted when one of his 'whips' went right into the lamp. With that in mind, Batman quickly glanced down at the three members of the gang and saw they were in no condition to put up much of a fight, though with his powered Batsuit it would be a very short fight, he doubted they'd take things that far.

He needed to try to find April, Doctor Corso, and Bullwhip, but first, he went to the cellar where he'd left the good doctor. The door was open and Batman only spared it a quick scan with the thermal sensors built into his cowl. The doctor was gone.

Batman was really tempted to try to find him, but he decided not too; Corso had suffered enough in Terry's mind after being heartlessly conned by April, harassed by the gang, forced to augment the ordinary punks who wanted to become dangerous so they could own the city after they 'kidnapped' April, and had to suffer from the heartbreak of worrying if she was still okay before he discovered the truth.

He didn't know where Corso was, but he doubted the doctor was going to cause any more problems, and besides, unlike real criminals, Corso had a life and a career to get back to, though what would change for him now Batman had no idea.

When he went to the balcony to look for any signs of Bullwhip, he found nothing but a scattered pieces of shattered glass, but that now left the townhouse the gang had used as their hideout, but then he heard a change in the groans from the gang and a quick look at them showed that the big bald guy whose cybernetic implants gave him a metallic covering was starting to pick himself up.

Quick as a flash, Batman was already handcuffing him.

"Don't even think about it," he warned in his dark, low growl but he didn't say anything more before he did the same to the guy whose own implants had given him those hand-like hammers. Batman had to turn this particular punk over, eliciting a groan Batman honestly had no trouble ignoring while he put the cuffs on him.

He didn't bother to do anything to the third guy since there was nothing to cuff since his lower legs and his wrists had been replaced with prosthetics, and they'd literally fallen apart when he had spoken the code phrase.

Once he was finished checking over the gang, Batman walked cautiously and slowly into the townhouse the gang had been using as a base. He didn't know if Bullwhip had returned to the townhouse to ambush him but Batman didn't think Bullwhip was that stupid; after seeing how the rest of his gang had been dealt with, Bullwhip must have run off but Batman knew he'd been wrong about a lot of things since he'd swiped the suit off of Bruce. So now he was ready to shout 'April Moon' if he saw Bullwhip again.

The townhouse the 'April Moon' gang had been using as their hideout was actually fairly nice, in a 'Here today, gone tomorrow' sort of way. There were a couple of sofas sorted into an L shape with a TV dominating the view, with a coffee table laden with a couple of pizza boxes, though the few slices of pizza stuck inside them looked fairly fresh and there were just a few cola and soda cans nearby, but other than that and a few other messes the townhouse was fairly tidy. A brief look at the kitchen showed the place was spick and span clean though he noticed the backdoor was open. Batman quickly checked outside but there was no sign of anyone, and he gave up the search to see if the only female member of the gang was hiding there and he went back into the house, noting how clean the place was.

_April must have cleaned up the place a bit when the gang had staged that 'kidnap' to get Corso to give them what they wanted to keep herself busy while they maintained the charade, _Batman thought to himself as he took in just how clean the rest of the place was, barring a few bits of clothing here and there.

Batman checked out the bedrooms. Unlike the rest of the townhouse it looked like April hadn't given a thought about keeping them tidy and as he searched the rooms and found a few pieces of jewellery the gang members had taken for themselves as part of their shares, along with a few credit cards, but then he walked into a bedroom that he instantly knew she had shared with Bullwhip. The place was virtually immaculate and he searched the wardrobes and found a few sets of clothes for Bullwhip which were in the same casual style the gang leader seemed to favour though there were different colours.

When he searched through April's wardrobe, he found a few nurse uniforms that had just been shoved uncaringly away along with a few sets that were both prim and proper but also modern and moderately glamorous. But the rest of her clothes were different. Batman had learnt how to tell a great deal about the people he fought by their clothes, and he could tell when April had conned Corso she had done her level best to present herself in a particular way when in reality she preferred to dress in a more slutty manner.

There was an open drawer in the bedroom and it was empty besides for a couple of credit cards and a few rings. Batman nodded to himself, guessing this was where April had stored her own stash from the robberies the gang had committed. When she had seen him fight the others she must have grabbed what she could and just ran for it.

Batman turned around and walked out of the bedroom and went on with the search of the townhouse before he finally gave up. There was nobody else here and he had found more than enough evidence to allow the GCPD to lock the gang up completely. As he walked out of the townhouse, he pressed the control on his utility belt, and he instantly heard the engines of the Batmobile rev up and he watched as the car came towards him before he commanded by remote control to land on the rooftop before he opened the cockpit cover.

After settling into the driver's seat he put a call through to Commissioner Barbara Gordon and waited for the former Batgirl to answer the call.

Finally, Barbara picked up.

"_Terry, what is it?" _Barbara asked briskly.

"Just thought you'd like to know I've dealt with the April Moon gang."

"_The what?" _Barbara asked confused, looking at him with crinkled eyes behind her glasses.

Batman shook his head. "Never mind, you'll find out soon enough; the gang who've been going around committing robberies with cybernetic implants. I've dealt with all but two of them. The first three are on the rooftop; you'd also better send an ambulance - one of them is in a bad way since he had been augmented to the point where his wrists and his legs below the knees were augmented, but now he's literally in pieces. I'm sending you the address now," he added and he tapped into the Batmobile's computer to access the street maps to find their location before he transmitted it to Barbara.

A second later there was a chime from the screen as Barbara received the address, and she checked it over before nodding and she glanced back at him in surprise.

"_You've dealt with the gang who have been causing problems for the last two days? Good stuff, Terry - my officers engaged them and they were sent to the hospital with lacerations and broken bones. Okay, I've got it. I'll have some cops and detectives visit the scene," _she said.

"They're gonna find lots of evidence here," Batman informed her, knowing which robbery Barbara was talking about. It had happened when Corso had knocked him unconscious.

Barbara nodded before Batman's earlier report circled back into her mind. "_What did you mean, three out of four? Two or them gone? I thought this was a four-man gang?"_

"No, it was a four-man-one-woman gang," Batman corrected, wondering if he should tell her about the mess Corso had been dragged in but then he decided to just get it out of the way since the police would almost certainly be questioning the three he'd trussed up like chickens on the roof after he'd worked out what the cut-off phrase to the cybernetic implants was, and it would certainly land the doctor in trouble. "The woman conned her way into the life of a Doctor, a cybernetics expert called Corso. Not long afterwards they were married after he fell deeply in love with her."

On the screen Barbara physically flinched as she listened, guessing where this was now going.

"The rest of the gang were keeping watch, and they began harassing Corso to make it look good," Batman went on while he kept watching on the radar screen to look out for the police transponder codes. He wanted to get back to the cave to inform Bruce about how it had gone. "Finally they staged a kidnap and took April away."

"_April? That's the wife?" _Barbara asked to clarify events in her mind.

Batman nodded. "The fake one, yeah. They forced Corso to augment their bodies; one received implants in his wrists that shot out long metallic whips, one received implants which created a metal shell that covered his body, one got implants which turned his hands into metal blocks, while the last guy had more radical surgery; he had his wrists and his legs below the knees surgically removed and replaced by prosthetics which hide chainsaws."

Barbara shook her head and sighed. _"You know it sometimes amazes me just how far some will go," _she commented.

Batman knew how she felt; when he had seen what kind of prosthetics had been implanted in the gang, he had been shocked anyone would go that far just to adopt a gimmick.

"I know. After the first fight I had with them, one of their servo motors was left behind by accident. Bruce and I examined it and we got on Corso's trail…," Batman went on. He told her about how Corso had knocked him out by surprise, how he and Max had tricked him in return by calling him out to a house where the doctor finally told Batman what had been happening, how he had met April, fallen in love with her, and eventually lost her to a kidnapping where he was forced to augment four street punks who were more forward-thinking than most since they'd come up with a good plan which April had been in on from the start.

Finally, Batman described what had happened during the rooftop fight, and how Corso had followed him and saw April with her true colours.

When he was finished Batman stopped to let Barbara take it all in. Finally, the former Batgirl sighed and shook her head before she looked up at Batman again.

"_You do realise we're gonna have to talk with this doctor, right Batman?" _she said, making sure he understood.

While he felt the doctor had gone through enough after being conned, it was out of Batman's hands and to be honest he really did not want to know what happened next. At last, he pulled from his wrist one of the recording chips built-in and he fed it into the transmitter and sent the audio file to Gordon's computer.

The commissioner noticed the upload instantly. "_What's this?" _she asked curiously.

"His story,' Batman replied shortly before he slipped his hands into the neuroreceptor grips and uploaded the pictures of the gang members along the way so the GCPD knew what to look for. "Look, Barbara - go easy on him. I don't know how long the gang have been waiting for April to lay down the foundation to pull off the con which made Corso augment the rest of her gang, but you didn't hear how he reacted; the guy broke down into tears, and he was so loud the gang would have killed us both."

When he was finished he saw the familiar irritation on Barbara's face and knew he had overstepped his bound and he sighed wearily.

Commissioner Gordon had never made it a secret that she was willing to work with him reluctantly, but that didn't mean they were friends. This was after all the woman who had warned him off twice to stay out of police business during that Curare mess. This was the woman who had launched a full-scale manhunt for him around the city when Spellbinder's illusions had tricked her, and to this day Terry went out of his way to keep some distance from the police so the same thing didn't happen again.

"_**You were so quick to believe the worst, it was easy."**_

It was kinda hard for him not to forget the parting words Spellbinder had said before the police carted him off and when Spellbinder had said that Batman had tried to keep distance between himself and the GCPD though he would only summon them whenever he was finished with a major case such as this one. He had learnt his lessons after that mess before Spellbinder created that illusion where he had murdered Mad Stan where he had interrupted a major sting operation.

But that didn't mean the tension between himself and Barbara wasn't still there.

Batman glanced at the radar screen and almost sighed with relief when he saw the police cars on their way.

"Look," he said, "just go easy on him - any way you've got the audio file and your officers are almost here."

With that, he turned off the connection and continued to wait until the cops were close enough. As he waited he couldn't help but think about April and Bullwhip. He wondered if April would head back to Corso, making up some kind of story to say she'd managed to find a way to escape, but he doubted it.

The con was off in her mind. The rest of the gang had been dealt with and soon they would be spilling the beans about what they'd been doing. Still, if April did try to contact the doctor, Batman was content to just let it happen. At least Corso knew where he stood with her and if she bothered to show her face to him again that was the doctor's own problem.


End file.
